The Medusa Stone

Eritrea

After leaving Badn, Mercer and Gibby made good time on their drive north to the foot of the Hajer Plateau. Mercer drove aggressively, racing across the desert like a professional rally driver. After recovering from his hangover, Gibby enjoyed the breakneck pace as only the young can. He would ululate when the heavy truck became airborne as Mercer rocketed out of shallow defiles, the deeply lugged tires spinning off plumes of dust when they came free of the earth.

Despite Mercer’s best efforts, they managed to cover only sixty miles in their intended direction, though the odometer showed they had traveled close to a hundred and fifteen. The terrain was too difficult for a more direct route. Also, Mercer did not take Negga’s warning about landmines lightly and steered the vehicle over only the worst of the ground — that which would have naturally slowed an advancing army and was thus less likely to be booby-trapped.

Even with Negga’s directions that the Valley of Dead Children was on the western side of the plateau, Mercer and Gibby still had over a hundred square miles to investigate. According to Mercer’s map, the area resembled a huge maze with hundreds of tall, isolated hills, box canyons, and meandering valleys that crisscrossed each other in complex patterns. He tried to match the map features to what was actually outside the four-wheel drive and quickly discovered the cartographer had simply drawn a representation of the region. No time had been taken to accurately depict every geographical landmark. For all practical purposes, the map was worthless. Instead, he taped the drawing he had done of the valley entrance to the dashboard and used it to guide him.

The territory had been carved by wind and water over the past few million years, the mountains worn down to stubs of harder rock. Having no idea into which mountain the valley was cut, Mercer and Gibby drove around each of them completely, checking the terrain against the drawing and coming up blank every time. They spent three days doing this before Mercer decided to attempt a desperate shortcut.

“This isn’t going to work,” Mercer told Gibby around noon on the third day.

In frustration, he powered the Land Cruiser up the slope of one of the taller hills, a seven-hundred-foot ascent in low range that loaded down the engine so badly that they reached the summit at a walking pace and the motor was on the verge of an explosive overheat. He twisted the key angrily, and in the sudden silence he could hear engine fluids boiling like a cauldron.

He snatched a pair of binoculars from the backseat and jumped onto the precarious load strapped to the Toyota’s roof. He turned slowly in place, the powerful Zeiss lenses pressed to his eyes.

“There’s a valley about two miles to the east that looks like it was once the major waterway through this area. If the kimberlite pipe broke through the surface, erosion would have spilled some stones or at least trace elements into the streambed.” Gibby didn’t have Habte’s command of English, so he looked at Mercer blankly. “Don’t worry, my friend. We may be on to something.”

It was just possible he could jump-start their search, he thought as he leapt back to the ground. He felt that same stirring of hope he’d experienced when the kidnappers mistakenly told him he was searching for a mine.

Surface topography had changed so much over the eons that the ancient river now appeared as if it had flowed uphill, but Mercer had no trouble telling in which direction the waters had once poured. He drove northward for nearly a mile and kept the Toyota canted at an angle as he guided it on one of the banks, suspecting that the streambed might be mined. They reached a sharp bend in the stream in the shadow of yet another mountain, a beige sandstone monument that offered little shade from the murderous sun. Gibby threw open his door as soon as Mercer braked.

“Don’t!” Mercer shouted just seconds before the boy stepped onto the dusty soil.

Jesus, he thought and opened his own door, his heart hammering from Gibby’s near fatal mistake. He studied the ground intently, looking for a telltale depression that might indicate the presence of a landmine. Seeing nothing, he told Gibby to break off the Toyota’s radio antenna and pass it over. He used it as a probe, pushing it firmly but gently into the friable dirt, twisting and working until it sank down about eight inches. Nothing.

The temperature in the vehicle skyrocketed past a hundred degrees. Sweat flowed freely from Mercer’s pores, stinging his eyes and making his vision swim. Yet his concentration was total as he continued with the antenna probe. It took twenty minutes before he felt confident enough to step out of the truck and a further two long hours to ensure that the immediate area around the Land Cruiser was unspoiled.

“Get the shovels. It’s time to work.” He threw the antenna into the truck and stripped off his shirt. His torso gleamed like bronze, and the bunched muscles in his arms moved like oiled machinery.

They attacked the bank where the water’s fury would have smashed into it, forcing the ancient river to give up some of the debris it carried. Miners coveted spots like this when panning for gold. Rivers would disgorge pockets of the precious metal in similar curves when the currents eddied and could no longer support the weight of the raw nuggets. Alluvial diamonds were also ensnared in such natural traps, their specific gravity being greater than most other suspended material caught in the flow.

For hours they dug in silence. Occasionally, Mercer would dump a shovelful of gravel onto a plastic tarpaulin and pour water over it from their diminishing stores. Apart from their legendary properties of defraction, diffusion, and hardness, one of diamond’s lesser known attributes is its inability to remain wet. Pour water on it, spray it, or douse it and its surface will bead and dry instantly. He used his finger to stir the dirt, wetting it all, picking though it carefully, examining the minute chips of stone that showed brightly in the mud. Satisfied, he would scrape the mess off to the side and continue digging.

The hole was over eight feet wide and nearly six deep when it got too dark for Mercer to accurately study the samples. The sun was a distant red disk painting the desert in thousands of hues — from deepest black to the rich vermilion of a rose petal. He had known when they started digging that they might come up with nothing this close to the surface. Northern Eritrea’s bedrock, formed during the Archean era, was some of the oldest anywhere on the planet. Its depth below the surface could be a mile or more, and in the millions of years since its creation, thousands of types of soils had been deposited on it. What Mercer needed was a core driller, a machine that could probe miles below the surface and return with samples. Bitterly, he realized hand-digging a few feet into the earth was a waste of time. His earlier hope evaporated.

“If there is a pipe around here and if it reached the surface and if it was worn down by erosion, there’s no guarantee it followed this watershed, and even if it did, any evidence might be buried two thousand feet or more,” Mercer told Gibby. “We’re going to have to keep driving around and find the valley the hard way.”

Mercer tossed one more shovel load of dirt onto the rim of the hole. He heaved himself out of the pit, extending his hand to Gibby and hauling the slender Eritrean to ground level. He looked at the spilled dirt on the plastic sheet and hunkered down to inspect the muddy pile, spreading it around, crushing a hard lump of ancient clay with his fingers. He began picking through it as he had fifty times that day with fifty other samples, his body mechanically going through the motions while his mind was already preparing for sleep. One small lump of rock had not been wetted when he dumped water on the pile. He reached over and shook the canteen over it. A few drops landed on the stone, beaded instantly, and trickled off.

“Gibby, get the flashlight!” Mercer almost choked as he spoke. His mouth had gone dry. He shook the canteen over the stone again, but it was empty. “And more water!”

The lad caught Mercer’s urgency and scrambled to get the required items. He was at Mercer’s shoulder an instant later. Night had come swiftly, and Mercer shone the flashlight on the kidney bean-sized stone between his fingers. The pebble was dark, cracked, and scarred, but there was a translucency to it, similar to pure quartz. Shaking slightly, Mercer tipped a liter bottle of water over his hands, washing away the accumulated grit from his skin, but no matter how much he poured over the stone, it remained perfectly dry.

“Is it?” Gibby breathed, his eyes fever bright as he looked at the stone.

Mercer didn’t respond. He strode to the Toyota, pressed a sharp corner of the octahedral crystal to the front windshield, and drew the stone across the glass. The screech set his teeth on edge. There was a deep white scar on the safety glass.

He was grinning when he spun back to Gibby, tossing the stone to the startled young man.

“It’s too rough to ever sit in an engagement ring, but you’re holding about twelve carats of industrial diamond, my friend.” Mercer whooped. Gibby looked at the stone, understanding at last, and added his own cries.

Mercer wanted to start backtracking down the old streambed to its source right away, but they had to wait until morning. He lay down in the Toyota, knowing sleep wouldn’t come. This was it. He’d done it. The men holding Harry would be calling again tomorrow at midnight, and he thought about what he would tell them. He didn’t want to disclose this find, but he had to give them something, just enough so they believed he was close. Finding diamonds this quickly was a huge advantage. He had four weeks left on his deadline and wanted that time to figure some way to end-run the kidnappers. If he had to, he would just give them the location, but he’d regained enough confidence to try and stop them first. They were going to pay for what they’d done.

He finally did sleep, and when he woke the next morning, his body had stiffened. Even the most minor movement brought a groan to his lips. “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

He roused Gibby, and soon they were driving again. The streambed meandered in long, lazy bends, forming a huge oxbow once and rising up a cliff that had been a waterfall at some point in history. They needed the tow winch to clear the former falls. Mercer took the time to scout the area with his antenna probe, losing several hours in the process.

The river led more or less in a direct north-south course. It appeared they were heading toward the main bulk of the Hajer Plateau, a huge up-thrust that overshadowed everything in the region. Mercer thought about abandoning the serpentine streambed and driving straight for the mountain, but he knew caution was his only ally here and stayed with the winding path.

“Effendi!” Gibby tore the pencil drawing from the dashboard, waving it like a talisman, and pointed to their immediate left.

Mercer’s drawing was nearly perfect. The Valley of Dead Children was there, cut into the side of a three-hundred-foot mountain, looking exactly as he had envisioned it, right down to a tumbling rock slide that had torn away one side of the steep valley wall near its entrance, partially filling the near vertical chasm. The mountain, with its inviting cleft, was about half a mile away.

The land between it and the riverbed was an open expanse pocked severely by impact craters, most likely from Ethiopian artillery. The churned-up ground near some of the scars was still blackened by explosives.

“Jesus,” Mercer breathed. The devastated area looked like the pictures he had seen of No-Man’s-Land during World War I.

He didn’t want to think about the men who had probably been caught in the open when the big guns began to rain death on them. He looked around for a makeshift cemetery but recognized the gesture was pointless. There wouldn’t be enough left of the men caught in the barrage to bury. Gibby was also affected by the sight. Too young to have seen the worst of the fighting, he could still comprehend the suffering that had made his nation free.

“We’re about to make it all worthwhile,” Mercer promised him.

He felt a degree of sacrilege as he drove across the killing field, knowing the tires were likely disturbing the bones of brave men. He wondered if the battlefield had served as a deterrent to others wanting to explore this area. Perhaps that was why no one had been to this region in so many years.

The Valley of Dead Children was roughly two hundred feet wide at its base and only twice that width at its top, a steep V-shaped notch in a nameless mountain. Mercer had to use low-range again to power the Land Cruiser over the loose scree that had tumbled into the valley’s entrance, racing the engine until it sounded like a turbine. The valley ran almost straight into the mountain for a half mile. Its sides weren’t solid rock but layers of sedimentary sandstone that had built up over the millennia. They were unstable; bits of rock and dirt pelted the roof of the four-wheel drive as he eased them through.

“No wonder the diamonds were never discovered before,” he said as the Land Cruiser broke into a huge open bowl of land at the valley’s end. “The geology is all wrong. This should be rhyolite or basalt.”

Once through the valley, they broke into an open pan roughly five miles across, the distant ring of mountains lost in shimmering waves of heat. Mercer could begin to understand why the nomads avoided this place. While vegetation was always scarce in the country, the bowl was devoid of even the hearty sage or cacti. The land was as lifeless as the surface of the moon. Gibby looked stricken as they drove deeper into the dead zone, his hands clutched in front of his chest as if in prayer.

“I do not like it here,” he muttered.

“Me either.” Mercer couldn’t shake his own feelings of disquiet.

They were halfway across when Mercer spotted something. About a mile away. Near where the protective ramparts rose off the bowl’s floor, stood a man-made structure of some sort. “What the hell is that?”

He recognized it when they were a quarter mile off. “I’ll be damned! It’s a head gear, a mine’s hoisting derrick.”

The structure resembled an oil well drill tower, a tall spiderweb of rusted steel girders supporting a large flywheel forty feet above the ground. Next to the tower was a cluster of crumbling wood buildings, one of which, Mercer knew, would contain the head gear’s machinery. The tower worked as the elevator mechanism for a mine. It would lower men into the bowels of the earth and haul mineral-rich material back to the surface in giant containers called skips.

After finding the diamond yesterday, he’d expected this discovery to be anticlimactic, but it wasn’t. Every step that took him closer to Harry was better than the last. He was grinning at the old mine when a sudden thought struck him.

There were diamonds here. The Medusa pictures were a strong indication, and the stone rattling in a dashboard cup holder was the proof. Why, then, had the mine been abandoned? Mercer guessed the buildings were at least fifty years old, and that age made him understand. Most likely, this had been an Italian operation built during their occupation of Eritrea and abandoned when British forces ousted them in 1941. It was possible that the Brits didn’t know about the mine site. Its location was remote enough to ensure its secrecy, and if Negga was any indication, the nomads avoided this valley. It was quite plausible that the mine had never been rediscovered, and if it had, during the revolutionary war maybe, the men who found it had been pounded into the earth by the long-distance artillery barrage.

Another question tickled the back of his mind. Eritrea’s civil war had been over for a few years. Why hadn’t the Italians returned and resumed their work? It was possible they hadn’t struck the diamondiferous kimberlite, but they had to know of its presence. Surely they would have come back. And then he wondered if the kidnappers were Italian and not Middle Eastern — a complication that he hadn’t even considered. This discovery was changing everything. Again.

Mercer braked next to the head gear, throwing open his door. Since this was a “lost mine,” he felt confident that the ground had not been sown with explosives. The head gear tower straddled a twenty-foot square opening in the earth, an ominous black pit that dropped into the stygian underworld like the mouth of Hades. At its edge, Mercer tossed a stone into the hole, his eyes glued to the second hand of his watch. His wait was longer than expected. Finally, there was a faint click from deep below. He calculated the drop: one hundred and sixty feet. “Jesus.”

“Effendi.” Gibby stood in the doorway of one of the larger buildings.

The building looked like something out of an old Western, rough planking and a shallow roof covered with rusted metal. Mercer peered through the doorway over Gibby’s shoulder, forcing himself to remain calm after he recognized the object on the floor. A mummy sat propped against one wall, the body of an Eritrean soldier left here by his comrades when they made their suicidal race out of the valley and into the waiting guns. The body had been so dried by the desert air that the skin on his face looked like a tight leather mask and his hands resembled claws. A dark stain blotted the front of his battle jacket. Obviously he had been wounded in a previous engagement and had either died here or was abandoned because of his injuries. The eye sockets were empty holes, the ragged teeth exposed in a gruesome rictus. Gibby dashed off and returned with the tarp, draping it reverently over the corpse, crossing himself repeatedly.

There were other reminders of the men who had camped here: empty shell casings, the mangled clip spring from a broken ammunition magazine, a blackened circle of stones that had been a fire pit, a heap of trash in one corner.

“We’ll bury the body before sundown and use this building as our base,” Mercer said. “It’s too late to explore the mine shaft.”

It was dark by the time Mercer and Gibby finished their grim task. Gibby fashioned a cross from a tent pole he’d snapped in two, thrusting it into the ground, praying over it silently. An hour later, the young man was snoring softly. Mercer rested with his back against the bungalow’s wall. Though he was tired, it was still easy for him to stay awake. The kidnappers would be calling at midnight. Because he had given Habte the sat-phone with the stronger battery, he would power the device moments before the appointed contact time. He had plenty of thinking to do before then, about the mine, the kimberlite, and about Harry. As midnight approached, he felt his palms get sweaty and his heart race. There was a knot in his stomach that cramped his breathing.

He feared for the retribution Harry would suffer for the death of the European at the Ambasoira Hotel. Mercer knew it would be bad.